Most marketing efforts are aimed at customer acquisition, and for good reason. Brands need to win over new customers because they see that route as the quickest way to achieve growth. To be a bigger company, you need to have higher revenues and broader brand reach. To achieve higher revenues and broader reach, you need to have more customers buying your products and recommending them to friends and family.

What many brands fail to realize is the importance of customer retention. They are so focused on winning over new customers that they make the mistake of assuming that the customers they acquire will always be there. Unfortunately, this single-minded approach to brand growth leads to high customer acquisition rates but low customer lifetime value. In other words, they bring new customers into the fold, but those customers only make a few purchases and don’t do much to move the needle.

Re-Centering Your Brand Marketing Efforts on Customer Retention

Growth is largely dependent on finding new people to adopt your brand and share it with friends. However, without customer retention being a strong focus for your brand, your customer acquisition efforts will ultimately be moot. Most of the people you are winning over with those efforts won’t bring considerable lifetime value to your brand because there will be nothing to keep them coming back.

Top-notch products and stellar customer service will help encourage customers to stick around for the long haul. Offering things that your competitors aren’t—like rewards programs or free shipping—will also drive customer loyalty and retention. But one important strategy that often goes overlooked is engagement.

Your brand needs to make it a priority to reach customers where they are and interact with them on their own terms. One way to open that door is to invest in video content. Focusing on video content will future-proof your business and help you stay relevant to customers in the 21st century. Cisco reports that, by 2019, video will account for 80% of all consumer traffic. If you want your customers to stay with you going forward, you need to put the emphasis on video in your marketing strategy.

Using Video Reviews to Drive Customer Value

Don’t have the budget to start producing video content right now? Don’t worry: there is a way that you can start using video on your website for minimal investment. This new strategy for adopting video content helps drive customer lifetime value more than other types of video marketing, from tutorial videos to video blogs.

With video review media, your customers take on the role of producing the content. All you have to do is implement the feature, encourage customers to use it, and then find unique ways to engage with the video and harness its value to contribute to your brand development.

How do video reviews help drive customer lifetime value? Consider how modern consumers shop online. While impulse buys do happen, most customers want to learn about a product before they place an order. In other words, they want an opinion from someone who isn’t affiliated with the brand. As such, customer reviews have the power to eliminate customer reservations and drive purchases.

This point is important because it shows how much power a single video review has. A five-star video on one of your product pages is the perfect aid to persuade skeptics to click “Add to Cart.” By providing shoppers with a second opinion right there on your product page, a video review is inspiring the completion of orders that would not have happened otherwise.

For each of those orders, you have the original reviewer to thank. In other words, when you activate video reviews on your website, each person who decides to record a review immediately spikes his or her customer lifetime value to a high degree.

A Word on Brand Trust and Loyalty

It’s not just the reviewers who increase their customer lifetime value when video reviews come into play. By adding reviews to your website and giving your customers a platform through which they can express their opinions—either positive or negative—you increase the level of trust that shoppers have in your brand. Trust leads to brand loyalty which in turn leads to more frequent purchases, more impassioned referrals, and greater customer retention.

The customer retention power of video reviews is also felt in the way video review media drives brand-customer engagement.

When more customers are leaving reviews—either in video or text format—it’s easier to spot areas where your brand has room for improvement. Maybe there is a common complaint about a certain product, or perhaps customers feel your customer service could be stronger. By paying attention to review content, you can keep track of these weaknesses and resolve to fix them. You can also engage with the reviewers themselves, either to thank them for a review or to find a way to turn their negative experience into a positive one.

Video reviews are perfect for sharing on Facebook or Twitter—not just because the positive ones act as promotional content for your products, but also because it’s a way to put customers in the spotlight. Modern consumers love social media callouts, whether from their favorite brands or their favorite celebrities. Using video reviews to give those callouts brings people closer to your brand and ensures greater lifetime value.